Improving Numerical Accuracy in Time-Domain Simulation for Power Electronics Circuits

Abstract

In time-domain simulations of power system transients, trapezoidal integration with fixed step-size is the most common method due to its accuracy and ease of implementation. Discontinuities occurring within fixed time-step when simulating power electronics circuits, may cause numerical oscillations and errors. Several methods are available in the literature for interpolation and handling of discontinuities. This paper intends to analyze how accuracy is affected by existing techniques for handling discontinuities in time-domain simulations based on the trapezoidal integration method. New algorithms are proposed to improve accuracy.INDEX TERMS Accuracy, interpolation, time-domain simulation, trapezoidal integration method. I. INTRODUCTIONCHRISTIAN DUFOUR (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree from Laval University, Quebec, QC, Canada, in 2000. He has been with Opal-RT Technologies, where he is the main developer of the SSN and ARTEMiS solvers. Before joining Opal-RT, he also worked on Hydro-Quebec's HYPERSIM real-time simulator as well as MathWorks' SimPowerSystems blockset.